Yes, and I told you how little the opinions of that peanut gallery are worth, with examples of why. Maybe you think they’ee all l33t hackers because the site is called “Hacker News”? They’re not. It’s just a vanity subteddit run by venture capitalists (Y Combinator).
I’ve been involved in direct action planning on and off since the 1990s. I was running activist infrastructure projects in the 2000s, and writing guides for activists on how to encrypt email with PGP. I’ve studied operational security as a whole, not just digital security. Not out of hobbyist curiosity, but because it was necessary to keep my people safe.
I know the limits of my security knowledge and choose what I say about it very carefully.
Right, but in the absence of anything about how that affects specific threat models, that’s word salad, not analysis. Whereas services being proprietary means that no security promise they make can be independently audited, which affects all threat models. That’s an analysis.
As it happens, being centralised is one of the things that makes a service proprietary. Because no one can independently confirm what the server is doing, even if they publish code and claim it’s what they use in production. In the absence of a fully reproducible build, ToS that oblige usings apps compiled by the vendor make it a proprietary service too.
Signal does both of those, which means that like WhatSapp, their security promises have to be take on trust. Which makes their E2EE promise worthless, because the whole point of E2EE is so you don’t have to trust the service. Even if its promises weren’t worthless, Signal is a SPoF and a juicy target for state-level actors. Since there’s no way to confirm it’s not a honeypot, it’s safest to presume it is.
So with all due respect, anyone holding up Signal as the gold standard for secure communication isn’t qualified to have an opinion on it. That disqualifies most of peanut gallery on HN.
Whereas I wouldn’t even be suggesting it if I wasn’t sure;
“Bringing E2E privacy to the Web: 4th security audit”
In summary, you’re calling me out for discouraging people from using existing fediverse DMs for sensitive comms, and offering some alternatives as candidates for evaluation. But you’re bringing a potato peeler to a gunfight, and I stand by every word in that piece.